With explosive growth of mobile devices and content, a conventional network architecture is no longer able to meet current market requirements. Then, software-defined networking (SDN) has emerged to meet these requirements.
A ring protection link (RPL) includes multiple nodes, and a link between each two nodes is referred to as a sublink. In the conventional network architecture, if a failure occurs on a sublink, that is, a failed link, nodes at the two ends of the failed link both block ports corresponding to the failed link, and the two nodes periodically send signal fail (SF) packets, which are delivered to an RPL Owner by using another transmit node between each of the two nodes and the RPL Owner node. In addition, the nodes at the two ends of the failed link and the other transmit nodes that receive the SF packets update local Media Access Control (MAC) address tables. After receiving the foregoing SF packet, the RPL Owner unblocks a local slave port and updates a MAC address table to implement ring protection link switching upon the failure. If the nodes at the two ends of the failed link include a neighbor node of the RPL Owner, this node directly instructs the RPL Owner to unblock the local slave port and update the MAC address tables.
If failure protection is implemented on an RPL by using the foregoing prior art, an increase in complexity of the ring protection link causes an increase in a link switching time, which results in relatively poor network transmission performance.